Together for Tourism

The tourism sector has been one of the hardest hit areas by pandemic restrictions all over the world – and Hungary is no exception. Therefore, the main aim this year of the organizers of the annual informal event of this profession, T-DAY (to be held at the Marriott Budapest Hotel early December), is striking an optimistic note and putting spirit into the dedicated actors of this industry.

The main mission of T-DAY is to provide a networking opportunity and meeting point for tourism operators in a stylish environment, in the form of an informal evening reception. T-DAY is a meeting place for people working in the tourism industry (hotels and catering, travel agencies, event management companies, airlines, car rental companies and other tourism-related professionals) who want to meet new colleagues and new business partners.

Inspiring people
The first T-DAY debuted in March 2010 as the official after-party of the Travel Exhibition in Budapest and has since become a regular annual networking forum for the tourism industry. As one of the organizers, Károly Bosznai, the owner of the T-DAY brand, recalls, “the basic idea was to organize a casual event for the tourism industry where the representatives of the sector can be together in a relaxed atmosphere. The tourism sector is very versatile and we wanted to provide these people with an annual meeting point. Last year, on the last Thursday of February, we could still hold the event before the pandemic but it was not the case this year. In the past one and a half years, we felt a strong pressure from tourism professionals to do something, to organize something to inspire people and motivate the colleagues.”
He adds that in addition to creating a meeting point, “T-DAY would like to provide opportunities with our modest means for people working in tourism to exchange ideas and opinions to talk and think together about how to forward the cause of Hungarian tourism. That is reflected in our motto ‘Together for Tourism’. A lot of people have left this industry recently. Fluctuation was not uncommon even before but now, this process has strengthened under the pandemic restrictions, Thus, we would like to create a positive atmosphere to ensure them that they are not alone.”

Closer destinations
The head of communication at T-DAY, Krisztina Henyecz agrees. “It is very important to strengthen the notion of togetherness within the tourism sector. We can achieve a lot more and a lot of success by joining forces than by individual efforts. I believe that this event is unique because again this year, it will make it possible for professionals in the industry to have easy-going chats, get to know each other and by using synergies, they can work together and create something new.”
She believes that a lot of Hungarians are planning to travel but are likely to stay within the country and thereby strengthen domestic tourism. Lake Balaton, the hills Mátra and Bük, the spa region of Bük and Sárvár, Sopron and Lake Fertő near the Austrian border as well as Budapest are still popular destinations. “We can say that by October this year, tourism in the countryside reached its 2019 pre-pandemic level with domestic traffic resulting in two million overnight stays in accommodations outside the capital, up 35% from a year earlier, even up 2% on the record year of 2019.”
She explains that quality accommodation and hospitality facilities and attractions await guests, a process that will be helped by mandatory accommodation certification from 2022, which will provide a compass and benchmark. The aim of the rating is to ensure that guests receive reliable quality in all types of accommodation, be it hotels, guesthouses or private accommodation.
In Budapest, the one million nights spent by foreign guests is four times last year's figure, but 42% below the 2019 result. The other neuralgic point is the emerging labor shortage, which needs to restore the sector's tarnished reputation. This is most noticeable in the capital. “The big question is how to tackle this labor shortage…,” she says.

Strengthening the feeling of togetherness
Károly Bosznai stresses that “now that there is a possibility to open businesses again, everybody is happy to be back in the tourism sector and glad to find that finally something has started to roll, something is happening again. Things started to move towards what was normal before and for the moment, everybody would like to work again as many of these people staked their lives on tourism. Those who stayed even in the pandemic period would like to restart their business because this is their profession. Basically, we want to give them a little faith. We could see in the past few months that in line with whatever was allowed by the government and by health circumstances, people again had the desire to go to restaurant, travel, stay in hotels, receive tourism services.”
People working in the hospitality and catering industry and related fields wholeheartedly welcomed this development but now, with the fourth wave of the pandemic in this country, there is great uncertainty again. The situation is especially perilous for those who are using the last reserves to keep afloat. “We would like to reinvigorate these people that ‘yes, we are here, we are doing it, we are together’, strengthening the feeling of togetherness in the profession as there has not really been an occasion recently where all these people could come together in such a relaxed format. Since there was great need for such an event in the past, we feel that people now are really hungry for such a gathering.”

Sustainable event for a sustainable sector
According to Krisztina Henyecz, more and more places of accommodation and catering strive to make their location as sustainable as possible and work in a ‘green’ way. Therefore, it is now becoming an expectation from higher management and guests alike that they require the consumption of food and drink in an environmentally friendly way and leave less harmful footprints. “We also wish to follow such guidelines and organize this T-DAY event based on such principles. We have an initiative to join forces with the MyForest community forests foundation, which means that part of the proceeds from this event will go towards purchasing trees that will then be planted, therefore contributing to the enlargement of green areas in this country. Also, we suggest that people arrive to the event with public transport, there will not be too many leaflets, we try not to use plastic tableware as much as possible, not use plastic straws but recyclable ones – this is what we pay a lot of attention to.”
Károly Bosznai concludes that “at this gathering, we will prefer purchasing from local businesses so that the focus is centered on domestic products, restaurants and other service providers – the event will be based on the ‘farm to table’ concept. We try to be sustainable in basically all elements.”